Dynamical and thermodynamical stability of two-dimensional flows: variational principles and relaxation equations

We review and connect different variational principles that have been proposed to settle the dynamical and thermodynamical stability of two-dimensional incompressible and inviscid flows governed by the 2D Euler equation. These variational principles involve functionals of a very wide class that go beyond the usual Boltzmann functional. We provide relaxation equations that can be used as numerical algorithms to solve these optimization problems. These relaxation equations have the form of nonlinear mean field Fokker-Planck equations associated with generalized “entropic” functionals [P.H. Chavanis, Eur. Phys. J. B 62, 179 (2008)]